Big porn sites swear you won’t catch an infection from them

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Did that recent report about malicious advertisements being served up on porn sites scare you away from your favorite lewd hangout? Fear not, says Big Porn, there’s no risk you’ll catch an infection from a little sweaty digital interaction.

Researcher Conrad Longmore kicked off the kerfuffle last week when he released a report based on data gleaned from Google’s Safe Browsing system. Popular go-to porn sites like xHamster and Pornhub were found to have an alarmingly high hit rate of malware.

The problem reportedly stemmed from a few less-than-scrupulous adult advertising networks. Ads pushed from their servers aren’t always put under the microscope — or even glanced at sideways — and that can give malware purveyors the green light to slip in a few toxic banners.

Slap a saucy lass under some tempting text, and you’ve got an ad that would have Admiral Akbar shouting “It’s a trap!!” According to Longmore’s calculations, a whopping 42% of xHamster viewers were at risk of seeing a malicious ad. Pornhub managed to break the 50% barrier.

But wait just a minute, say spokespeople from both sites. The flow of infectious advertising has already been blocked, like so much unwanted chatter from a submissive.

xHamster says it’s now virtually impossible to sneak malware onto the site thanks to rigorous new checks that have been put in place. Pornhub, too, says it takes this kind of thing seriously. Out of the 15.5 billion ad impressions served up every month, only a minute fraction have ever been linked to malware. Those, the site owners say, are ferreted out immediately.

It’s easy to make statements like those, of course. And when you’re serving up 15.5 billion ads a month it’s got to be incredibly tricky to stay ahead of the crafty deviants who are pushing malware. The risk will always be there, because the criminals pulling the strings figure there’s a payoff.

But hey, even if you do pick something up, at least it’ll be the kind of infection you can clean up with a quick run of Malwarebytes.